How I deliver MVPs in 8 weeks

Eight weeks is tight - but it works

Eight weeks is a short timeframe for a software development project. Even with all the latest tools and faster development times available now, eight weeks is still quite a small timeframe to deliver.

But the way I make it work is by really focusing on the 80/20 features and deliverables.

The 80/20 principle in action

You know, 80% of your results are gonna come from 20% of the effort. That's not to make me sound lazy in any way! But not everything we put into the system is going to be received equally by your customers and users.

There's going to be some things that are of very low value to them and very complicated to develop. Likewise, on the other side of that, there's going to be some things that are very simple to develop and take hardly any time at all.

We're looking to really focus our attention on the things that are quite straightforward and gonna deliver the maximum amount of value.

Now, that's not always entirely possible. Some things are important and just complicated, and that's just the way they need to be. That's fine.

Avoiding feature bloat

But what we're trying to avoid is what we call in the industry "feature bloat" - that's pumping too many things into a product in a bid to try and impress customers and users. Actually, it can do the opposite. It can turn people off.

I don't know if you've used something before - a software product - where it's just too confusing. There's too many buttons. There's too many options. And that's what we definitely don't want.

For a start, it's probably gonna give a bad user experience, like you may have had. But also, the more complexity we add, the higher the cost and the longer the timeline.

The lean, targeted approach

So to keep things within eight weeks, we go for a very lean, targeted launch. That means not having absolutely everything you want on your wishlist. That means putting some things aside for a version 1.5 or a version 2.

This allows us to deliver a usable product that:

• Your customers can benefit from
• You can get feedback on
• You can start collecting licence fees on really, really quickly

And once you've got some licence fees, then that can be used to fund additional features.

Why this works better

I really think that's the better way to build a software product. I've seen quite a few people make the mistake of going all in, spending a year, two years building something, and yeah - the market moves on, or it didn't sell as well as they thought. They've put time and money in, and they would've been a lot better going for a shorter cycle, smaller start, getting feedback and iterating from there.

So as much as I am an engineer and I like building things and creating software, I really do like the lean, targeted approach. And yeah, that's how I keep things within eight weeks.